This past weekend in China, Warner Bros. and Legendary’s “A Minecraft Movie” conquered the box office and broke the hegemony of local blockbuster “Ne Zha 2” which grossed $2.11 billion after a 10-week reign. But it might be a short-lived triumph thanks to U.S. President Donald Trump‘s tariffs.
Source: Could Trump’s Tariffs Lead to China Banning Hollywood Films?
The Future of Cinema Summit at the NAB Show opened Saturday morning with speakers who agreed that AI can make production faster and cheaper, but it can’t do everything. Meanwhile, the issue of jobs remained murky. “This is the age of the generalist,” suggested Eric Shamlin, CEO of AI-driven production studio Secret Level and co-chair of the TV Academy’s AI Task Force, during the SMPTE-produced summit.
Source: NAB Speakers Debate AI’s Impact On Jobs And Artists: ‘This is The Age of The Generalist’
CinemaCon is supposed to celebrate the magic of the big screen and the power of the cinematic experience. Instead, this year’s Las Vegas gathering was a tense, testy affair that threatened to resurface old tensions between studios and exhibitors. All the frustrations of the past five years, during which a pandemic and two labor strikes left the movie theater business a pale shadow of itself, nearly boiled over.
Source: CinemaCon Takeaways: Fights Over Theatrical Window, Fizzling Star Power and Amazon MGM’s Big Promise
NaNoWriMo, the non-profit organization that grew out of the annual tradition National Novel Writing Month, had a solid 25-year run encouraging writers to speedrun the novel writing process, but it has come to an end. On Monday, the organization announced that it would cease operations due to ongoing financial issues, as well as some very public drama that has played out in recent years.
Source: Longtime Writing Community NaNoWriMo Shuts Down After AI Drama
Some Hollywood studios are reportedly earning money from fake AI-generated movie trailers on YouTube, against the wishes of the union representing actors. According to a report from Deadline, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, and Sony Pictures redirected ad revenue to themselves instead of enforcing copyright protections and shutting down the popular Screen Culture and KH Studio trailer accounts.
Source: Movie studios are being financially rewarded for AI slop on YouTube
With fewer people stopping by the box office, Regal Cinemas, Pacific Theatres, Alamo Drafthouse and others filed for Chapter 11. Some of these companies have reemerged after bankruptcy; others have dimmed their marquees forever. As a result, North America has 5,691 fewer screens compared with pre-COVID times, according to research by media consultancy Omdia.
Rohan Sahai, who leads the Sora product team, tells The Hollywood Reporter in an interview that there’s been considerable interest from the entertainment industry, without specifying the contours of the conversations. He sees utilization of the tools across most stages of production as the tools improve. “For some of these bigger production companies, the ones who are forward-looking, they see where things are going and try to think about how to change their whole workflows to make the best fit at this moment in time,” he says.
The Independent is to launch a news service which it said will use Google AI tools to summarise its journalism for “time-poor audiences”. The publisher says all content written for the service, named Bulletin, will be “reviewed and checked” by journalists before publication and seven people have been hired to staff it. The service will use Google‘s Gemini AI model to re-write the Independent’s own articles, the publisher said, alongside its own “in-house data and development teams”.
Source: Independent launching AI-powered news service for ‘time-poor audiences’
China’s vertical short drama boom took center stage on Hong Kong Filmart’s opening day, with a collection of the creatives driving the trend extolling the opportunities being offered in a market they predict will soon be worth around $14 billion annually. For the uninitiated, the phase “vertical short drama” refers to series shot with a vertical rather than horizontal orientation so they can more easily be viewed on smartphones.
Source: Filmart: How the China-Led “Vertical Film” Movement Wants to Upend the Way We See Cinema
Threatened by potential EU regulatory changes, the movie, music, and sports industries are vehemently defending the practice of geo-blocking, as an essential part of their business models. Rightsholders argue that eliminating geo-blockades would devalue content, force price hikes for consumers in some countries, and ultimately reduce investment in content and localized services.
Source: Movie, Music and Sports Industries Urge EU to Keep Geo-Blocking in Place * TorrentFreak